A gay Latino's intimate journey through addiction, human desire and broken love. Winner of the Pen/Faulkner and Lambda Awards for Fiction (2013), this is Saenz' first book of poems in years. Eileen Myles, Poet and Novelist, says of this collection: "Benjamin Alire Saenz’s poems are ballads. They’re stories but they also have a whiff of the life sailing by from the car just passing with the radio on. It’s music in stores selling stuff and suddenly it’s inside your heart too painful to ignore. I love the honesty of this work and the sharp sweet reminder that we pick up art, our own and other people’s (including their tattoos) same way birds hold onto something inside and out to fly forward. His tunes are wild and brave."

Truly, the best seats in the house for watching the spectacle of the Mexican Revolution were located along the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas and its sister city Juárez, Chihuahua. Indeed, these cities—like the city of Boston, Massachusetts, for the American Revolution—served as the intellectual crucible for the Mexican Revolution. This is where the first modern revolution of Latin America began. The heroes and images of this people’s uprising still populate the border’s cultural landscape like ghosts.

Jaya’s a rich kid. Rasa’s motherless and broke. Opposite sides of the tracks. Romeo and Juliet, on fair Oahu.

Seventeen-year-old Jaya Mehta detests wealth, secrets, and privilege, though he has them all. His family is Indian, originally from Gujarat. Rasa Santos, like many in Hawaii, is of mixed ethnicity. All she has are siblings, three of them, plus a mother who controls men like a black widow spider and leaves her children whenever she wants to. Neither Jaya nor Rasa have ever known real love or close family—not until their chance meeting one sunny day on a mountain in Hau’ula.

Xelena González and Adriana M. Garcia collaborated all the way from China and San Antonio to create ALL AROUND US, a beautiful picture book that meditates on circles, cycles and family. “The concept of circles is playfully connected to specific objects like clocks, eyes and bicycle wheels,” González said, “and also to abstract cycles like the mulching process, the digestive system … even the larger circle of life and death.” The book’s overriding lesson is respect: for elders and for the earth. Garcia’s colorful, kinetic illustrations offer neighborhood scenes such as backyard gardens that pulse in the artist’s signature style, which seems to make rays of energy radiate visibly. [Click the headline to read the full story.]

"Words should fly like airplanes over custom offices and international borders, and should land in all the fields"- Vicente Huidobro

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